Authorities investigate bogus Blackhawks tickets

Blackhawks forward Patrick Kane takes the ice before a playoff game at United Center in Chicago. (Scott Strazzante/Chicago Tribune)

Even those unable to discern a snapshot from a slapshot can appreciate that Chicago Blackhawks tickets are hot items, with seats to the next playoff game Sunday selling for nearly $600 on Stubhub.

Those steep prices, authorities say, help explain the allure of forging tickets — an ongoing problem that surfaced most recently Friday when Edgar Kim of Bolingbrook was charged with selling two counterfeit tickets for $250 on Craigslist. And that was just for a regular season game. The temptation to cheat during the playoffs may be even greater.

Authorities said they also are investigating Kim on suspicion of selling $500 worth of phony tickets to another Blackhawks fan for that same regular-season game, a Dec. 27 contest with the Colorado Avalanche.

“They looked like the Ticketmaster copy you would print off online,” said one victim, an Elk Grove Village man and season ticket holder who asked not to be identified. “Nothing was out of the ordinary. They looked like the real deal.”

The 50-year-old businessman said he didn’t know he’d been taken until he showed up at the United Center with friends and relatives for the December game and was denied entry.

The charges against Kim, 29, underscore a prolific problem brought by refinements in printing technology over the last 15 years, one that surfaces in a variety of places in and outside of sports, experts say. Home printers have become sophisticated and relatively inexpensive, said Bill Patterson, vice president of global licensing for OpSec Security, Inc., an international brand protection and anti-counterfeit company based in Denver.

“Year over year, the proliferation of counterfeit tickets has been increasing,” Patterson said on Friday. “These days, the access to desktop publishing is so easy that sophisticated visual aspects can be done very well by inexperienced people.”

A spokesman for the National Intellectual Property Rights Center, headed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that the money from selling counterfeit tickets and other goods is so tempting that it has moved beyond a bad guy with a high-quality printer.

“With counterfeiting, the profit margin is so great that in some cases it’s greater than selling drugs,” agency spokesman Justin Cole said. “That’s why we’re seeing more gangs and organized crime turning to selling counterfeits to fund their criminal operations.”

Even the best tickets can be faked to the point where an unsuspecting — or desperate — fan can be duped.

“Super Bowl tickets are one of the most, if not the most, sophisticated tickets around, and they are being counterfeited,” Cole said.

Thieves have found ways to work around numerous anti-counterfeiting features, such as holograms, color-shifting ink and raised print. In some cases, they’ll remove a holographic sticker from a hat or other sports item and affix it to a fake ticket.

“You have a raised level of sophistication from consumers who are looking for these (features),” Cole said. “But instead of an actual hologram, they’ve got a lower quality version, or maybe they pulled a hologram off a piece of clothing and used that. So, even though the sophistication of tickets is increasing, the sophistication of the counterfeiters is absolutely increasing.”

Most counterfeit tickets revolve around professional sports, college sports and major concerts, he added. “That’s not to say they don’t exist in other things, but the amount of money doesn’t usually make it worth their while,” Cole said.

The problem pops up sporadically in the sports-crazed Chicago region, where bogus admission tickets, parking tickets, even carnival tickets have surfaced over the years, records show.

Over one memorable weekend in 2008, police arrested five people outside Wrigley Field for selling counterfeit tickets for a Cubs-White Sox game. The Cubs turned away 100 fans with fake tickets, according to a Tribune story, which also noted that both teams were in first place at the time.

Last September, a man from the West Englewood neighborhood was charged with forgery after he was arrested trying to sell four counterfeit Chicago Bears tickets for $600. He also was accused of previously selling two bogus Blackhawks tickets.

And, as recently as February, Chicago alderman were dealing with counterfeit street parking receipts that were printed and used by unscrupulous valet services.

Blackhawks spokesman Adam Rogowin said the organization encourages fans to purchase tickets from the United Center box office, Ticketmaster or the team’s TicketExchange resale website. “That’s the only way to be sure the tickets are valid,” he added.